Womp womp. Nintendo posted its first loss as a public company in 50 years as competitors, specifically Android and iOS, have chipped away at their market. Despite building a base of more than 151 million DS users, other handheld devices have bridged the gap. The most telling note comes from an analyst who sees a different problem:

“At the moment, we cannot see anything really new,” said Satoru Kikuchi, a Tokyo-based analyst at Deutsche Bank. “Since the DS and Wii we have just had more instalments of Mario.”

This is, of course, ironic as public markets don’t usually reward original properties in the event that the fail, but I think Kikuchi is right. As beloved as the Mario franchise is, it’s difficult to compete with the wealth of new properties that are showing up on the App Store each week.

[via Financial Times]